


First Aid

by Cosmicobit



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Venom (Comics), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Other, YOLO, arguably - Freeform, could fit anywhere and anywhen, flashbacks to non-graphic violence, injury/healing, lots of emotions, so much, sooooo much use of the love word
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-10 07:21:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15944510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmicobit/pseuds/Cosmicobit
Summary: Venom Symbiote/Unspecified 2nd person host:In the dark by yourself, you will choke on your own blood, but what thought should your alien other choose to leave you with . . .But love?





	First Aid

The fight just now was brutal and stacked wholly against you, and you’re sure you’ve never been so close to death—the bone deep cold speaks to that.

They had peeled your other away from with cacophonous agony. They kept you hemmed in place with fires they’d set, as they beat your other into submission with sound. And then they’d killed you: as your shadow flinched away, sinking into your skin where it trusted you to protect it, you felt bullets drive into your chest. The sensation of them shocked you, even as the other shrieked in fear and agony, having never meant in its pain to leave  _you_ exposed. The idea hadn’t occurred to you, either, as you charged your attackers bare-skinned and unprotected, an all too easy target.

Your other, the symbiote, understood sooner than you what had just occurred, and surged back to action despite the continuing onslaught of the noise it so hates. Too little too late, your other spit out the shells. It dragged your wavering form away to this dingy shelter where no one will find your body once you’re gone. And still, you bled, wounded more deeply than it knew how to heal for you. And now, after all of this, you realize that, not only are you going to die, but you’ll do it alone.

In the dark by yourself, you will choke on your own blood, but what thought should your alien other choose to leave you with . . . But  _love_?

 ** _Love,_** it shows you as it flees your skin, sliding thickly away like so much peeling flesh, formulating the sentiment through images and feelings more than words ad it goes. You know it can talk, have heard its voice, but this remains your most honest form of communication.

“No,” you slur,  _wait, darling—_

But it recedes, leaving you alone with your wounds.  _Why …?_

 ** _Love,_** you feel again.  ** _Safe. Help._**

 _By_ leaving _me?_

**_Help!_ **

Aiding hands, sounds of comfort, the warm sensation of safety, all of these flicker in your mind’s eye as your other slips away from your skin, leaving you naked and alone. Compared to its warmth, even your own pooling blood seems cold.

“No,” you try to croak again, “please,” but there is no one to hear it, and you cant be sure the sound even leaves your mouth anyway. You are alone. For the first time since you found your other, you are alone.

Fever dreams remind you of that day: like a marriage, so much around you then was white. Cold , clinical white with the other a swelling, soundlessly shrieking bolt of black in the bright space. Even then it called to you, to your curiosity and horror.  To your crippling loneliness–you’d known lovers before, but none of them had truly ever filled that lonely hole in you. Until then: the other sang a wailing and wordless song just out of range of human hearing that spoke to the exact same feeling … In the end, of course you came together. Of course you ran from that place with the other now synced to your shadow. Of course you let it consume you, so much closer to it than any other being could ever be. Your dance together was viscous and visceral.  You  _lived_  as you tasted blood between its–your—teeth.

How could things have gone so  _wrong_?

Oh, but you know:  _everyone is afraid of us._ That dance doesn’t look so friendly from point of views outside of yours, all they see is blood and rage. They don’t know your other. They don’t feel what it does. They don’t know how deeply it  _can_  feel. They just know it’s capable of pain, and they know how to make it hurt. And so, during the fight, they’d done just that.  _Fear_ did this. Fear and hate for the unknown.

You choke on a metallic bubble of what must be blood, and your vision swims. Not that there was much to see anyway in this dim, half-wrecked old building where the other hid you to die.

 _How is_ this _love?_  You wonder, as the dark pours into your vision.  _You left me. Love, you_ left  _me._

Even when the two of you were never meant to be alone.

As your field of view goes black, you imagine it’s really the other, wrapping around you. It’s a fantasy. A pretty lie. But isn’t the worst way to die.

And then—

_Spip._

A noise like a bubble popping, followed by a hiss. You can’t see to be sure it isn’t a sewer rat and not something else; you are too far gone. Death feels warm. Like sliding into a bath, only the heat sinks immediately inside of you, your skin clammy by comparison, as if to replace the blood you’ve lost. The warm of it washes over you, filling up the holes in your chest, gunking up your already blood-logged lungs.

**_Help._ **

You dream the feeling of its voice while, in your head, a swirling, off-color memory that isn’t yours spins through your understanding. In it, you see one of your murderers, gun raised high, panic in the eyes, and there is a smell … the other was focused on his smell before chomping down on him, before being filled with the taste of his copper blood, blood,  _why blood?_

_… Transfusion–!_

For a moment before passing out again, you understand that you will live.

When your eyes blink open a second time, you can feel the difference from before: you are tired, you hurt, but you’re not weak and empty and cold. Quite the opposite.

“My love,” you grumble, “thank … you.”  _You did it._

 ** _Help._**   ** _Save—_**

With these feelings comes another emotion, too, boiling over whether it wants to share or not. The other is nestled both within and without you, partially seeping into your flesh while lies over you, a blanket woven into your veins, and it shivers as its feelings flicker through you. You feel cold in its mind, a terrible clutching fear, and feel the reverberations of sound your own body can’t make.  ** _Afraid._**

And why shouldn’t it be? Without you, it would have days left to exist … though, there are other hosts. Your other could have belonged to anyone—

But that’s just it, isn’t it?

_Oh. “ **Afraid**.”_

The other is draped around you as far as the bridge of your nose, keeping you warm, measuring your breaths. It can breathe for you, filter for you, and just now it enriches you, the feeling of pure oxygen making your head spin. You can’t see much of it, laid out beneath it like this, but you can feel it everywhere, still shaking.

“Oh, love,” you breathe into the part of it blanketed over your mouth, smooth, slick like the surface of water, a wetness that you can feel but doesn’t transfer to your lips. You try reflexively to bring your arms up around it, but it’s enveloped you right down to the floor, and it would sooner be in your veins than be held, anyway. What you  _can_  do is turn your hand palm-up in the warm, humid space between its distended body and the floor, so that you might press the sensitive pads of your fingers against your other and glide them in gentle circles across its skin like liquid marble. Hard, but smooth. Wet, but dry, the slimy-soft of algae, maybe. Your mind can’t always make sense of the way your other feels when it is outside of you—that isn’t where it belongs.

“It’s all right,” you murmur, “you did it. it’s all right.”

Across your body, the other flinches. It transfers to you the sharp memory of sound that hurt it before, and then a terrible lurching sensation as if gravity had just dismissed the both of you into some endless freefall void. The weightless falling has a tune in the memory, too: a deep, wet, sticky thump, thump thump, thump thump.  _A heartbeat,_ you imagine, but no … Too irregular.  _Bullets._ The way your other heard them: like something trying to break through the wall.

Your other doesn’t speak without controlling parts of you, only bubble and pop and hiss, but now it renders a sound like air leaving a balloon, and shrinkwraps itself more closely around you. Your petting is forced to halt as it winds around each individual finger and in so doing stills your hand. It’s trying to be closer to you everywhere, is what’s happening, but it feels almost as if it’s holding your hand.

“Hey,” you say, muffled by its skin against your mouth. “Hey. It’s not your fault. They hurt  _both_ of us. They hurt us  _together._  There was no better way out of that mess than to run, and you know it.”

The other gurgles, and a temporary swell of pressure in the now shallow canals of your many bullet wounds says much more clearly than words how little that matters to this liquid shadow of yours.

“It’s part of the risk, love. That’s all.”

A smooth tendril of the other presses its way between your lips and lies down across your tongue, tenderly but indisputably closing up the cavern of your hard palette before you can say any more.

_Oh, come on._

_I know you can still hear me like this—it’s just like how I feel you._

The other churns—internally, anyway, its body doesn’t flinch atop you—and sends you waves of woeful fear that tear at your heart far more than your conscious thoughts. It’s an animal honestly of feeling that you share.

 _Don’t be sorry for me,_ you insist, communicating in thoughts as much as memory and feeling, taking it back with you to the moment when your enemies had first struck it so hard with its few weaknesses, with horrid keening decibels and merciless heat. You dwell in the moment when the sound met your ears.  _Didn’t you feel me then, love?_ You take it back with you to the pit that opened up in your stomach and the memory of how its terrified agony pierced you, how the feeling of it evaporating into slender tendrils running for shelter inside of your skin struck you not as frightening, not as a risk for yourself, but how it filled you with aching sorrow, and how vengeful wrath swelled in you until you saw red and lunged  _into the sound,_ into the onslaught,  _into their fire._

 _For you,_ you insist in the reaches of your heart and mind.  _I was afraid, too._

As quickly as it had come, your other’s grip slips from your fingertips. It rears up off of your naked body, curved over you like some great cobra with only a few tendrils trailing down to the still-knitting holes in your chest. Its eye markings narrowing and shifting, it looks you in the face.

This is a confrontational pose for a symbiote. Their kind communicate better through the mind, and have very different uses for communication face-to-face, but you understand that this isn’t aggression you’re being offered. This is your other learning you as you have learned it, for a moment taking up the human norm of eye contact as it begs you in the silent language you share to tell it true: are you truly not mad? Can there really be  _nothing_  to forgive?

 _“_ Nothing, my love. I promise you.”

 ** _Love,_** it echoes, and dives headfirst down to your face, your mouth, slipping back inside of your shared body, to how you both belong.

“That’s right.”

Your other echoes it again, borrowing your voice to repeat the sentiment back even as it settles into your blood stream.  _Every day, it’s learning so much …_

“ **Love.”** It says.  ** _Together._**

You let it feel your warmth, an emotional smile.

_Yes, darling._

“Always.”


End file.
